Gratitude Mondays

What am I loving and thankful for this week?

• A much needed respite from my lovely children. My parents took the girls for 4 days. That gave me time to relax, read, watch some really crappy television, and paint a wall in our living room. Plus the girls were able to visit their cousins (including a sleep-over for Gwennie at her cousin Madder's house.)
• Evenings during the aforementioned respite with my hubby.
  
• This new/old laptop that I am using. We played computer tango this weekend. Will bought a new laptop, I am now using his old one, and our desktop became a media center. Why is this good? I mean this laptop only holds a charge for seven minutes, so it has to be plugged in at all times. Let me explain the previous set up. We used our desktop as our family computer and as a media center. Because we were using it for both we had to use an Xbox as the conduit between the media center and the television. That meant the computer was always on, and the Xbox was always on (power drain). Because I am a little bit of a computer addict and the computer was on 24/7, it was too easy to waste my day looking at blogs and Facebook, and other things online. I would waste the whole day and feel ridiculous at the end of it. I needed to be able to turn the computer off. But every time we turned off the desktop we would have to re-sync (and by we I mean Will) the computer and Xbox. Now I can turn the computer off and have no repercussions.
  
• A birthday party at the new Sea Life aquarium. This was nice because we were able to go and check it out free (for us) and decide if it is worth spending the money to see it again. (The answer is NO.) However it was cool to see once. The seahorses and jellyfish were my favorites, closely followed by the octopus.